What if the Nardal Sisters had never stopped speaking to us? What if their salon still existed, like a frequency capable of traversing time, oceans, and memories?

Pascale Obolo’s project takes the form of a video performance-installation that builds upon the research conducted in AFRIKADAA: Politics of Sound #2. Obolo envisions the Nardal sisters’ salon as a living architecture of listening: a space of rest where images, voices, and music are no longer put forth as documents of the past, but as active presences capable of opening other futures. Le Salon des Écoutes Réparatrices revives the intellectual, political, and emotional legacy of the Nardal sisters through an immersive experience of collective listening, reading, and the sharing of sound. The salon, for Obolo, becomes a space for sensory transmission and healing in the face of a history of colonial violence and the erasure of Black memories.

At the heart of this proposal are video-sound readings from Obolo’s Black sonic archives that aim to reveal the invisible continuities between the struggles of the twentieth century and the imaginaries of the twenty-first. 

The performance is guided by a simple yet speculative question: If Paulette and Jane Nardal were alive today, what music would they listen to in order to continue reflecting on the world?